Deeplinks Blog posts about Transparency

EFF just received documents that reveal additional post-9/11 Defense Department misconduct, including attempts by the Army to investigate participants at a conference on Islamic law at the University of Texas Law School and Army-issued National Security Letters (NSLs) to telecommunications providers in violation of the law.

When a state government stores public property information in an electronic format, the format of its storage shouldn't change citizens' right to access the information, right? Well, wrong -- at least in California after a recent Court of Appeal decision. But, in an encouraging sign, on Wednesday, the California Supreme Court granted a petition to hear the case and review the lower court's decision.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday (pdf) that the government must turn over information from criminal prosecutions in which federal law enforcement agencies obtained cell-site location information without a warrant. The suit, filed as part of EFF’s FLAG Project and in conjunction with the ACLU, sought the release of the case numbers and case names in which the government had tracked the location of a person’s cell phone without obtaining a warrant.

In June, we published an article highlighting the problems with uploading sensitive documents to two Wikileaks imitators, the Al-Jazeera Transparency Unit (AJTU) and the Wall Street Journal'sSafehouse. Apart from the well-documented security problems of both sites, we noted that their terms of use (TOU) offered whistleblowers very little protection.

On August 8, AJTU published its revised TOU, attempting to address our concerns. We've looked through the new terms and we're happy to report some good changes.